Fatal Tesla Crash Into Home Raises More Questions

  

Around 8 P. M. Friday June 19, 76-year-old Martha Avila was standing in the playroom at the front of her daughter's house in Katy, Texas.  Her daughter, son-in-law, and their children were also in the house or in the back yard.  Suddenly a Tesla Model 3 occupied by 44-year-old Michael Butler crashed into the house after reaching a speed exceeding 70 MPH on the short residential street.  The car pinned Avila, who was extracted from the crash by EMS personnel but later died at a local hospital.  Within a few days, Avila's family had filed a lawsuit against Tesla and Butler, and last Wednesday the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) announced it was opening an investigation into the accident.

 

Something obviously went wrong if a car failed to negotiate a right turn of a residential street and instead hopped the curb and plowed into a house.  According to those investigating the crash, Butler, who was also injured, claims that the vehicle was in self-driving mode at the time of the accident. 

 

Elon Musk, Tesla's CEO, has issued a statement on social media saying that the crash "made no sense" as the self-driving mode usually maintains a low speed in residential areas.  Another Tesla official stated that according to vehicle data, "the driver pressed the accelerator to 100% and reached a speed of 73 MPH before the crash." 

 

Clearly, investigators have a job on their hands to figure out exactly what happened.  Rose Hollow Lane, the street on which the Tesla accelerated, is only about 1000 feet long before it makes a right turn going east and becomes another street at the corner where the crash occurred.  Teslas are notorious for their ability to accelerate rapidly, however, so it's possible that the car was traveling at a lower speed at first and then responded to its accelerator, which might have been pressed in error. 

 

In fairness to Tesla, there are plenty of examples of non-self-driving cars crashing into structures and killing people as well.  Tesla releases quarterly statistics on its vehicles that are operating in full self-driving mode, and claims that the number of accidents per million miles is lower than the average for the entire U. S. fleet.  Critics say that this isn't an entirely fair comparison because the Tesla fleet is newer and has more advanced safety features than the average car on the road.

 

All the statistics in the world won't bring back Martha Avila, however, and that is why the family is suing Tesla and the driver of the car. 

 

According to information on Reddit, the driver of a Tesla in full self-driving mode can override the system by pressing on the accelerator.  If that's what happened in the accident, the responsibility cannot be laid exclusively to Tesla, which is why the driver is also being sued as well. 

 

If we allow imagination to roam, perhaps the following scenario occurred.  As the driver went down Rose Hollow Lane, perhaps a squirrel or other small creature darted out in front of the car.  Intending to hit the brake, Butler instead pressed the accelerator pedal.  The resulting goose of energy could have sent the car off the road into the house where Avila died. 

 

Again, we will have to wait for the outcome of the NTSB investigation to find definitive answers to the questions raised by this tragedy.  If the cause turns out to be largely human error which could have happened with a non-self-driving vehicle, then there is nothing out of the ordinary about it except that the vehicle happened to be a Tesla.  If on the other hand, there was something about the self-driving mode that contributed directly to the crash, investigators will want to know what it was, and possibly issue directives to fix the problem.

 

Other self-driving vehicles such as Waymo rely on multiple types of sensors, while Teslas have so far relied exclusively on vehicle cameras, possibly for reasons of cost.  Whether such a compromise will be viable going forward may depend on how frequently crashes occur which could have been avoided through the use of a wider variety of sensors.

 

The course of autonomous driving in the U. S. has not followed the forecasts of its initial optimistic promoters.  The SAE five-level autonomous-driving scale which ranges from Level 1 (e. g. cruise control) to Level 5 (fully self-driving in all conditions everywhere) shows that there are only a few places in the world where Level-4 cars such as Waymos operate specific routes in favorable conditions.  As we noted in this space a few weeks ago, Waymo temporarily suspended operations in San Antonio and other locations where its vehicles ran into trouble with flooded streets.  So for most people, self-driving cars are not something they encounter voluntarily, unless they take a Waymo taxi where they are available, or take a ride with a Tesla owner who wants to show it off.

 

It looks like the ideal Level-5 self-driving car is still in the future.  And even if it arrives, it may remain in a niche market favored by the handicapped, the elderly, and other people who simply can't drive at all without it, or have to hire a cab.  For the rest of us, the price we'd have to pay for even a Level-4 self-driving car is way more than what it is worth to us not to have to bother turning the wheel and operating the pedals when we're in the car.  And that may remain the case for the indefinite future.

 

As for Tesla, which still promotes its "Full Self-Driving" mode of operation in what seems to be a misleading way, the requirement for the driver both to let the computer drive the car and still remain ready to take over if something goes wrong means that the driver's attention is theoretically required all the time, but practically almost none of the time.  I don't know about you, but I would find it very hard to just sit behind the wheel and pay attention to the road just as much as if I were driving, only not drive.  It may be a situation like this which led to the accident that killed Martha Avila.

 

Time will tell, and if the NTSB investigation report reveals anything new, we hope to bring it to you in this space.  But not right away.

 

Sources:  I referred to reports at https://abcnews.com/US/tesla-allegedly-autopilot-mode-crashes-texas-house-woman/story?id=134062374, https://www.fox26houston.com/news/tesla-sued-after-katy-crash-leaves-76-year-old-woman-dead, https://www.khou.com/article/news/local/tesla-crash-katy-texas-ntsb/285-42522116-a98b-4e89-8bae-7db39b5d642d, and a reference to a Forbes report (unfortunately behind a paywall) at https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2025/11/14/tesla-finally-releases-fsd-crash-data-that-appears-more-honest/. 

Autonomous Cars Need Waymo Time Out for Floods

  

Pardon the bad pun.  But imagine that you've taken one of the new driverless Waymo taxis from the San Antonio airport right after a big rain.  The car exits the freeway, and on the access road ahead you see where a nearby stream has overflowed, and water the color of coffee with cream is rushing across the road.  The Waymo vehicle keeps going.  You can't be sure, but the water looks deeper than you'd like, and if you were driving, you'd follow the poetic advice to turn around rather than drown.  You look for a panic button in the car:  there is no such thing.  You think about just opening a door and jumping out, but the car's going too fast for you to try that without risking your neck.  Just as the front wheels hit the water, you feel the car skidding, and you decide to try jumping out anyway.  Only now the water pressure on the door is too great, and it won't open. . . .

 

This didn't actually happen.  But it could have. 

 

On April 20, after heavy rains caused flooding on several roadways in San Antonio, an unoccupied Waymo vehicle was swept away from an interstate access road in floodwaters arising from Salado Creek.  The vehicle was later found about half a mile downstream. 

 

Following this and another incident earlier in the month, when a Waymo car became stuck in high water in San Antonio and had to be towed out, Waymo suspended all service in San Antonio and five other cities in three states, including Nashville and Atlanta.  Another Waymo car got stranded in Atlanta during heavy rains as well.  Waymo is working on updating its software to prevent such incidents in the future, but as of today, service still appears to be suspended in Austin and Atlanta, although it has been restored in San Antonio.

 

Waymo is to be commended for taking swift action in the face of obvious problems that could kill passengers in a peculiarly horrifying way.  Especially with high-tech operations of super-wealthy companies such as Alphabet (the parent firm of both Waymo and Google), profit sometimes takes a back seat to safety, and that is as it should be. 

 

Up-to-date information on high water in roadways is currently available through various means, including municipal emergency services and mapping organizations such as Waze.  But especially in Texas, floodwaters can rise within minutes, and few systems can respond that fast.  It looks like the challenge of directly detecting the presence of high water on a road through on-board sensors is something that is either too hard to do, or too unreliable.  So Waymo and other autonomous-vehicle operators may rely mostly on third-party data about where it's too dangerous to drive because of high water. 

 

Despite the drama surrounding the flooded Waymo cars, this is actually part of a process I would call normal engineering.  No matter how many problems a designer anticipates before a new technology is fielded, there will always be some issues that don't show up until the technology has been in use for a while.  This is doubly true for a complex multidisciplinary system such as an autonomous vehicle.  The world is simply too complicated for non-omniscient engineers to anticipate every single thing that might go wrong before deploying a system in the field.

 

Many of the locations where Waymo suspended service were new to the company, so Waymo had its first encounter in those cities with this spring's rainy season.  While California also has flash floods, I don't think they are as prominent a part of the landscape as they are in central Texas, for example. 

 

If I'd been riding in a Waymo car headed toward a flooded road, I wouldn't have had a lot of options.  There is no panic button as such in a Waymo.  But on the Waymo website there is a section titled "Pulling over, collisions, and security events."  They do list an option to ask the car to pull over out of traffic, but the decision as to how and when to do that is up to the system, not the passenger.  There is a way to contact "Support" (presumably a human being on the monitoring staff that every autonomous-vehicle company maintains), but having a conversation with someone possibly thousands of miles away as water surrounds the car is probably not the first thing you'd want to do.

 

All things considered, it was the wisest course for Waymo simply to shut down all service until their engineers can figure out a way to keep their cars out of water, hot or otherwise. 

 

This is also a good example of how semi-serious incidents can flag a problem that could easily lead to more serious consequences, such as customer fatalities.  If you look into the details of many historic engineering disasters, you will commonly find that less serious precursor incidents often happened in the days or years leading up to the big disaster.  This isn't always the case.  But it happens often enough that system designers should train themselves to take very seriously any safety-related problems that constitute narrow escapes.  And they should address the issues allowing such narrow escapes before some unlucky person encounters the combination of circumstances that proves deadly.

 

In shutting down all service in certain cities until the flood problem can be addressed satisfactorily, Waymo did the right thing.  This doesn't guarantee that nobody will ever drown in a Waymo car.  But in taking such a public move that obviously cost the company revenue, Waymo has both given itself time to fix the problem, and has sent a strong message to the public that they regard passenger safety as paramount. 

 

Sources:  I referred to articles in the Austin American-Statesman at https://www.statesman.com/business/technology/article/waymo-freeway-robotaxi-safety-pause-22272052.php, the BBC News website at https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgplyxxl75o, and Waymo's own safety information at https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9449023?hl=en. 

California Ends Free Ride for Robotaxi Ticketing

  

For good or ill, many things that start in California spread to the rest of the U. S. sooner or later, from Hollywood movies to the Hula Hoop.  So when California's Assembly Bill No. 1777 takes effect this July, companies such as Waymo that operate robotaxis across the country may feel its effects outside just California.

 

The bill, and its implementation by the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), closes a loophole in California law that has up to now allowed driverless vehicles to escape being ticketed for traffic violations.  Previous laws assumed there would always be a driver behind the wheel to cite for illegal U-turns or other roadway malfeasance.  However, existing California law made no provision for ticketing driverless vehicles.

 

That will all change come July 1.  After that, the corporation operating the vehicle will be the designated legal recipient of any citations concerning vehicles under its control.  The ticket takes the form of a "notice of noncompliance," but the effect is the same.  To allow the DMV to track robotaxi company violations, the company must report any citations to the DMV within 72 hours of receipt.  In case a collision was involved, the window shrinks to 24 hours.  If a firm receives too many citations, the DMV is empowered to take drastic action such as limiting the firm's fleet size or even suspending its operating license. 

 

The new law also addresses the problem of how first responders can deal with driverless vehicles that get in the way at a fire or accident scene, for example.  It mandates that the operating companies must respond to calls from first responders within 30 seconds, and requires that companies observe geofencing rules that clear a designated area within two minutes.  Apparently, autonomous vehicles have obstructed the operation of fire and emergency vehicles in the past, and these new laws address that issue.

 

In the modern world, technological developments generally outpace the social infrastructure of laws and customs.  That is why robotaxis in California have been escaping traffic tickets until now, because lawyers and legislators are not prophets, and they can't expect to anticipate every possible new technological development so that the laws are waiting to be used when the technology finally comes along.

 

Most consumer technology is at least intended to have benign effects, but the good of taking people and goods from one place to another is accompanied by problems such as traffic violations.  Getting a traffic ticket is often the only interaction most law-abiding citizens have with law enforcement, but it is a little galling that robotaxis were effectively exempt from such experiences until this year in California. 

 

It's part of the normal progress of technological development for new laws to arise that deal with unexpected problems such as the ones the California bill addresses.  The issue of clearing an area for emergency operations couldn't even happen until there were enough robotaxis around that one of them got caught in such a situation, and led to frustrations and hazards that, while probably not costing a life, made enough trouble for first responders that they reported it to the appropriate authorities.  And while many uncomplimentary things can be said about the California legislature, in this case they seem to have done a good thing in mandating effective communications and actions whenever a driverless vehicle is impeding the work of first responders.

 

It's fair to say that there probably wasn't a popular groundswell of grassroots opinion demanding that robotaxis be able to receive traffic tickets.  The issue is not one to get the average Joe Public's juices going.  Contrast this matter to another technological fault line that is currently the subject of much (mostly local) legislation and discussion:  the construction of data centers around the country. 

 

As an editorial by Charles C. W. Cooke points out, data centers are not new.  In some form we've had them around for decades, and currently there are about 5,000 of them in the U. S. already, with the largest concentration in the liberal state of Virginia. 

 

Yet, to listen to discussions at city council meetings around the country or to see the "No Data Centers" signs popping up in yards, one would think that each data center is a direct portal to Dante's Inferno.  Why are people so upset at data centers, while robotaxis being immune from tickets was never a big deal?

 

Fear has something to do with it—fear of the known unknown.  For most people, robotaxi immunity from ticketing was an unknown unknown.  I didn't even know it was an issue until California fixed it with their new law.  But the publicity about data centers, and their notorious connections with the mysterious and frightening acronym AI, are well known enough, though what the consequences will be in terms of water and energy depletion or increased cost is largely unknown.  After all, if something's not built yet, you can't say exactly what will happen if you build it.

 

Opponents have rushed into that gap of ignorance with highly inflated predictions of disasters that will hit you in your pocketbook:  higher power and water prices, water shortages, and even loss of jobs as AI takes over what you and twenty of your friends do, and does it better and cheaper.  Nobody is threatened in that manner by the fact that robotaxis couldn't get traffic tickets.  Injustice somewhere else never matters as much as injustice to my bank account. 

 

So while even the California legislature can take effective action about a matter that few people knew or cared about, it's not clear that laws slowing down the construction of data centers are going to make anything better.  Saying "not in my back yard" doesn't stop construction as long as back yards don't cover the entire U. S., and that won't happen for a while.  But unless the public understands the issues well enough to make an informed decision, there is not much chance that legislation about data centers that is driven by public opinion will do much good.

 

Sources:  I referred to several articles on California Assembly Bill No. 1777, including https://driveteslacanada.ca/news/california-makes-big-changes-to-autonomous-vehicle-legislation/, https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/robotaxis-driverless-vehicles-now-ticketed-150019014.html, and https://www.carscoops.com/2026/04/california-robotaxi-citation-rules/.  Charles C. W. Cooke's article "Hatred of Data Centers Is Irrational and Self-Defeating" is at https://www.nationalreview.com/2026/04/hatred-of-data-centers-is-irrational-and-self-defeating/. 

Waymo 80% Safer than Human Drivers: Why Not Switch?

 

According to Waymo, the Google division that operates self-driving robotaxis in several U. S. cities, their vehicles are involved in 80% fewer injury-causing crashes than human-driven cars.  This was a surprise to me, as it may also have been to Kelsey Piper, who writes in a substack called The Argument that if we want to reduce the number of traffic fatalities in the U. S by 80%, all we have to do is switch to Waymos.

 

At the current rate of nearly 40,000 U. S. traffic fatalities a year, that would be saving 31,000 lives a year.  But she cites a poll conducted by The Argument which found overall that only about 28% of respondents favored allowing self-driving cars in one's town or city, and 41% favored a ban, as Boston and other cities have considered doing.

 

Piper speculates that a general distaste for AI-powered things may be behind what looks like irrational opposition to self-driving cars.  Some Waymos have even been attacked by modern-day Luddites.  As she puts it, ". . . you can't vandalize ChatGPT, so anti-AI sentiment finds its expression in harrassing Waymos."

 

She realizes that anything like a wholesale move to self-driving cars would cause massive disruption to our present transportation system.  She also acknowledges the tendency of government to make optional things mandatory.  Right now, Waymo is one private company offering a specific service in a few carefully chosen markets such as Atlanta, Austin, San Francisco, and Phoenix.  With the possible exception of Atlanta, these are all locations with plenty of sunshine and relatively few days of inclement weather.  And the service in Atlanta only commenced last June, so Waymos in that city have not gone through a typical Atlanta winter, which almost always includes an ice storm, as I know from living there a couple of years.  Ice may present serious challenges to Waymo's algorithms.

 

So there are practical limitations to the areas that Waymo can operate.  As one of the commenters on Piper's article mentions, Waymo has somewhat cherry-picked markets in which it can compete while maintaining its very good safety record.  Even if Boston decided to allow Waymos, I expect a long development period would delay its deployment as the company figured out how to deal with snow, ice, and slush on the former cowpaths that are now Boston streets.  At least the Waymo cars probably wouldn't get lost as much as I did whenever I drove to Boston when I lived in New England, which was, well, pretty much every time I went there. 

 

But there's those 31,000 lives.  As Piper points out, that's more lives than are lost every year to homicides.  Wouldn't it be nice if we could eliminate all homicides?  Well, numerically, changing to self-driving cars would do that. 

 

The psychology of why we tolerate such a lot of annual deaths to traffic accidents is interesting.  People don't always act toward various risks in reasonable ways.  The classic example is driving to the airport to fly somewhere.  Unless you live within walking distance of the airport, you're going to drive or ride.  And unless you take a Waymo there, you will ride in a human-operated car.  While lots of people are afraid of flying much more than they are afraid of driving, the chances of dying in a plane crash are much lower than the chances of dying in a car wreck on the way to or from the airport. 

 

I suspect that we have gotten so used to the 40,000 or so traffic deaths every year with some variation on the notion that it always happens to someone else, and if I were in the same situation that somebody else died in, I would have been clever enough to save myself.  These are pure rationalizations, but the alternative is to experience a little squirt of adrenaline every time we buckle the seat belt and pull out of the garage. 

 

Five or ten years ago, there was a lot of hype about how every new car would be self-driving within a few years.  That obviously hasn't happened, for a variety of reasons.  One factor is the expense per vehicle.  Waymo doesn't advertise how much each of their vehicles cost, but various estimates say it's probably on the order of $160,000 to $300,000.  This puts them in the super-luxury class, and explains why they aren't deployed in areas that will not generate pretty good revenue.  Even with the carefully-chosen markets that Waymo has selected, it appears that they are not making a profit yet, which means the whole thing is still an elaborate experiment oriented toward some future situation that hasn't materialized.

 

Still, I will admit that if I could have a self-driving car that was absolutely trustworthy, a Level-5 one according to the SAE autonomous-vehicle rating system, one you could read or sleep in while the machine takes care of all driving tasks, and not pay a whole lot more for it than I'm paying now, I would at least consider it.  But in my relatively small town, which would not provide enough revenue for Waymo under its present operating circumstances, that's not going to happen.

 

Now and then on my trips to Austin, I see a Waymo eerily coasting along with nobody inside, and once I saw two in a row.  I will admit to having a flash of mischief when I saw one the first time, and wondering what would happen if you pulled in front of it and slammed on the brakes suddenly.  Probably nothing bad.  Fortunately, I was a passenger in the car I was in, not the driver, and so the experiment was never performed.

 

Unless something radical happens in the areas of AI, sensors, or legislation regarding the right to drive your own vehicle, it looks like Waymo and similar autonomous vehicle companies may not spread their wares much farther than they've already done.  And that's too bad for the 40,000 or so people who die on roadways each year.  Some ideas look good in theory, but when you start examining everything that would have to change to put them into practice, it just falls apart.  And converting our fleet of vehicles to nearly 100% self-driving looks like another one of those nice ideas that has had an unfortunate encounter with reality.

 

Sources:  A note in the online magazine The Dispatch referred me to Kelsey Piper's article "Please let the robots have this one," at https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/please-let-the-robots-have-this-one.  I also referred to a Reddit item on the estimated cost of Waymo vehicles at https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1g8vv7o/where_did_the_whole_talk_about_the_cost_of_waymo/, and the Wikipedia article "Waymo."

Tesla Smart Summon App May Not Be

. . . all that smart, that is.

 

Say you're a well-off single twenty-something guy with a brand-new Tesla and you read the following on your car's control screen:

 

"Buckle up for the ride of your life, except, surprise!  You're not in the car.  ASS (Actually Smart Summon) allows your vehicle to come to you, or head to a spot that you choose, all on its own.  It's like magic, but with more tech and less wand-waving."

 

What's not to like?  Imagine leaving a bar with your date and saying, "Watch this," and pressing the ASS button—on the phone, that is.  And your new Tesla just quietly leaves its space in the parking lot and pulls up next to you.  How cool is that?

 

And how likely are you to follow the fine print on the instruction screen to the letter, which reads in part "Keep an eye on your car and its surroundings at all times.  Stay vigilant, especially around the fast and the furious (people, bikes, and other cars)."  No, you're more likely to be lapping up the adulation from your date. 

 

So when the U. S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) received a complaint about a crash involving a Tesla under Actually Smart Summon control, it started looking around and found several other similar incidents in media reports, a total of twelve malfunctions that it is currently investigating.

 

Part of the problem is that the NHTSA has told Tesla to report directly to them any crashes on "publicly accessible roads" that involve autonomous operation of its vehicles.  The Summon software has an internal interlock that prevents it being used on public streets, and it's intended only for parking lots and driveways.  This leads to a debate about what "publicly accessible" means.  If you have a gate at the bottom of your driveway, it's not publicly accessible.  But what if there's no gate, or the gate is open?  I'd say most ungated parking lots for retail and commercial enterprises are publicly accessible.  It looks like Tesla hasn't been entirely forthcoming to the NHTSA, assuming in the first place that they knew about some of the incidents.  And considering how intimately the software of every Tesla is tied to corporate HQ, I suspect they had the data at their fingertips.

 

The Associated Press story about this latest kerfuffle between the NHTSA and Tesla reminds us that in the past, Elon Musk, Tesla's CEO, has complained that the regulatory agency is stifling progress in autonomous driving technology.  There is speculation that once the Trump administration is in charge of all executive-branch agencies such as the NHTSA, Musk, who donated heavily to Trump's campaign and was appointed to a government-improvement board, will pressure the NHTSA to lay off Tesla, in short. 

 

How much regulation is too much?  It depends on who you ask:  the companies that are regulated, or the people who benefit from regulations.

 

Just to pick a historical example, ask any member of the families of the so-called "radium girls" who spent eight hours a day in the 1920s painting radium dials on watches and clocks, came down with radiation poisoning, and died horrible deaths.  The use of radium was not regulated at all back then, and the radium girls paid the price. 

 

On the other hand, a classic case of "rent-seeking," which means a firm that uses government regulation to create a monopoly or other favorable business environment for itself, came about for most of the twentieth century in the U. S. when Ma Bell (American Telephone and Telegraph) regulated away virtually all other telecomm companies except for a few harmless local enterprises here and there.  In retrospect, this over-regulation stifled competition and slowed technological advance to a crawl until antitrust lawsuits broke up the monopoly and led to the explosion of telecomm services and smartphone apps that we (mostly) enjoy today. 

 

There are two extremes to think about.  The same AP article mentions that Tesla suffered its first decline in sales in a decade last year.  Could this be a sign that regulatory burdens are losing Tesla business?  I doubt it.  There are so many other factors involved—Chinese competition in electric vehicles, the continuing high prices of EVs compared to gasoline-powered cars, even political factors (I'm sure there are some people who will refuse to buy a Tesla simply because Musk hangs out with Trump)—that blaming a sales decline on regulatory pressure is implausible.

 

Musk has a well-earned reputation for playing fast and loose with bureaucracies and their spawn, namely regulations.  This attitude on the part of a radical innovator is understandable.  Technical innovation frequently gets ahead of the law, in that it creates situations that are unprecedented and nobody has had the time to figure out what laws to pass regarding them.  Musk seems to believe that it's easier to get forgiveness in retrospect than permission in advance, and there is some truth to that.

 

On the other hand, he also seems to think that telling people to be careful absolves him and his company of responsibility if a Tesla driver disobeys instructions.  Many crashes involving the "self-driving" features of Teslas have happened because, in direct contradiction to instructions telling drivers to keep their hands on the wheel and be prepared to take over if something unusual happens, the drivers have been doing things like watching videos on their phones. 

 

It's possible something similar is happening with the Summons features.  Besides the Actually Smart Summons, there is a Dumb Summons that lets you manually drive the car like a giant radio-controlled toy, and that obviously requires you to pay full attention to what you're doing and watch the four-camera display on your phone while you're doing it.  But the NHTSA is concerned about latency issues and how fast the car can go in this mode, as it looks like remote-control drivers may not have had enough time to avoid obstacles such as other parked cars and bollards (those traffic-preventing posts mounted in the ground).

 

My two cents on this is that the NHTSA is doing about right in not taking drastic action such as banning all Teslas from the road, but not ignoring new problems as they surface in complaints and media reports either.  The NHTSA will continue to spotlight problems with Teslas, and Musk will continue to gripe that they're overdoing it, and life will go on. 

 

And maybe the people making up acronyms at Tesla for the next new app will be a little more careful about what it spells.  I spent five minutes trying to think of how I could incorporate ASS in my headline, but finally took the high road and left it out.  Not everybody else will, though.

 

Sources:  An Associated Press article published on Jan. 7, 2025 entitled "US opens another Tesla probe, latest focused on tech that remotely returns car to driver," appeared at https://apnews.com/article/tesla-investigation-safety-autonomous-death-a158e4dee7b5e94b148ec3bb5c47233d.  I obtained the instruction quotes from a screenshot contained in a short video demonstrating the ASS app at https://www.youtube.com/shorts/RmVk-0LlDMI. 

Human And Autonomous Driving: A Deadly Mix?

"Who's in charge here?"  If people in an organization can't give a clear answer to that question, chances are the organization is in trouble.  And something along those lines may apply to cars as well as to human organizations.  That's the lesson we can draw from the preliminary report released by the U. S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) last Thursday, May 24, concerning the fatal collision between a pedestrian and a semi-autonomous vehicle operated by Uber in Tempe, Arizona last March 18. 

To summarize the accident, around 9:39 PM on that Sunday night, Elaine Hertzberg chose to walk her bicycle across a divided street in between crosswalks, in a section of road that was poorly illuminated by streetlights.  She was not wearing reflective clothing and her bicycle had no side reflectors.  She apparently did not see the oncoming car until just before the collision.  Subsequent toxicology tests showed traces of marijuana and methamphetamine in her system.  Regardless of her condition, it's the responsibility of drivers (or the car's computer) to look out for the behavior of all pedestrians, even those who aren't behaving with normal alertness.  And if this responsibility is split or ambiguous, trouble is brewing.

An in-cab video released after the accident shows that the car's driver was studying something below the windshield in the cab until she saw the pedestrian just before the accident.  In my earlier blog on this incident, I mistakenly speculated that she was looking at her cellphone instead of the road, but it turns out she was monitoring a display of the self-driving car's behavior, as part of what was basically a research project in which the driver would take the car out on prescribed routes to test its systems. 

The most informative piece of evidence in the NTSB preliminary report concerns the state the car was in just before the crash.  The Volvo was equipped both with the latest Volvo-engineered safety systems, including a collision-avoidance system, and also with Uber-installed computer control.  Probably to avoid interference between the two systems, the Volvo safety controls were disabled when the Uber computer was set to operate the vehicle.  The Uber computer system is able to determine when emergency (hard) braking maneuvers are needed, and is capable of executing them.  But at the time of the accident, the emergency braking function was disabled, as Uber found it had led to erratic behavior.  The operator was apparently aware of this setting and of her responsibility to take emergency actions as needed, in addition to monitoring the vehicle's operations on the screen and "tagging events of interest for subsequent review." 

People can do only so much at once.  Abundant research has shown that too many distractions degrade a driver's ability to respond to unexpected emergencies.  Uber was basically running an experiment requiring significant driver attention while operating their vehicles on public roads.  It didn't take too long for the unfortunate combination of a driver distracted by monitoring tasks to coincide with a pedestrian whose attention was clouded to lead to a tragedy, and to suspension of Uber's experimental autonomous-car program, plus numerous calls on the part of state and federal lawmakers for a slowdown in the deployment of autonomous vehicles.

The final report from NTSB on this fatal accident will probably not come out until next year.  But their preliminary report shows how things can go wrong tragically under the current regime of what are called level-2 and level-3 autonomous driving systems.  The five-level ranking system goes from Level 0, which is what I can do in our 1955 Oldsmobile (no computer within miles) to the hypothetical Level 5, the yet-to-be-realized situation in which the self-driving car performs absolutely all driving functions and the passenger's participation is limited to telling the car where to go when he or she gets in. 

No one has yet deployed a Level 5 vehicle, and getting there will require extensive testing of lower-level systems in the real world.  Testing involves risks and unknowns—otherwise you wouldn't learn anything from it.  The dicey problem faced by autonomous-vehicle developers has always been to strike the right balance between exposing their systems to a wide enough variety of real-life situations to learn enough to improve them, and not taking so many risks that one of the close calls turns into a severe injury or fatality, as the Uber accident did.

One of the fond hopes of self-driving-car promoters is that once we get to the point where their well-designed systems are extensively employed, automotive fatality rates should start to decline steeply.  Nobody (well, almost nobody except a few suicidal maniacs) wants to die in a car wreck, and so from a utilitarian perspective, if a few people die during early-phase testing of self-driving cars, but then as a result thousands get to live who would otherwise have been killed by cars driven by people, that's a good tradeoff.

But that cold mathematical view doesn't appeal to our emotional side, and so the media and legislators react to a single fatality in a way that seems out of proportion.  I'm not sure it is, though.

What we may be seeing is part of a very normal process of social self-regulating feedback that has led to improvements in safety ever since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.  The first thing that has to happen in this process, unfortunately, is that somebody gets killed.  And the reason they were killed has to do with a new technology.  The bad publicity attracts attention from the public, who is now less inclined to welcome the new technology; those in the position to regulate the technology, such as legislators;  and the promoters of the technology itself, who are moved to improve safety out of self-preservation.  Laws or regulations are enacted by legislators or private entities such as insurance companies, and the new industry sometimes imposes new rules on itself.   The causes of the original fatalities are mitigated or removed, and life goes on with the new technology, which in the course of time becomes old and familiar.  This happened with steamboats in the 1800s, it happened with human-driven automobiles in the early 1900s, and it appears to be happening with self-driving cars now.

As long as we don't get into some kind of prohibition panic and ban all self-driving cars forever, reasonable rules about testing new systems and deploying market-ready ones can be devised.  Compromises will have to be made.  Even if all cars were Level-5 quality tomorrow, a few people would still die in car accidents.  But chances are there would be a lot fewer than 40,000 or so per year, which is what the U. S. automobile fatality rate is running at today.  And many of those fatalities are caused by distracted drivers, including the Uber driver who had too many things to watch on the dashboard, and failed to see the pedestrian until it was too late.

Sources:  A news report summarizing the NTSB findings appeared on May 24 on the Reuters website at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-crash/ntsb-uber-self-driving-car-failed-to-recognize-pedestrian-brake-idUSKCN1IP26K.  The preliminary report itself can be downloaded at https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/HWY18MH010-prelim.pdf.  I first blogged on this incident on Mar. 26, 2018 at http://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2018/03/self-driving-car-kills-pedestrian.html.

Chicago Objects to Driverless Cars

You know a technology's beyond the infancy stage when politicians start paying attention to it.  Driverless cars such as those being test-fielded by Waymo and other firms have upset a couple of Chicago aldermen to the extent that they have tried to enact a ban on them, saying they're too dangerous.  In an editorial as remarkable for its brevity as for its directness, the Chicago Sun-Times claims to take the side of the future in a piece titled "Driverless cars on the road to the future."

According to the Sun-Times, the aldermen—Ed Burke and Anthony Beale—are worried about jobs.  More perhaps than many other large U. S. cities, Chicago is a working-class town, and drivers of many kinds—cabbies, truck drivers, delivery people, airport personnel—make up a significant number of voters.  As such peoples' representatives, the aldermen elected by a particular district should take the concerns of their constituents seriously.  And if driverless cars threaten jobs, well, trying to do something about it is within the rights of a reasonable politician.  There's a whiff of hypocrisy in claiming safety concerns about a matter that's really more about jobs, but no more than usual in today's political environment.

The editorial writers take the side of Illinois's Governor Bruce Rauner, who may sign a bill that would prohibit Chicago and other cities from enacting a ban on driverless cars.  Conflicts between municipalities and state governments seem to be cropping up more frequently these days, typically with big cities taking more progressive positions and getting reined in by more conservative state legislatures and governors (Rauner is a Republican). 

If driverless cars become a significant percentage of cars on the road, that will mark one of the biggest technological changes in transportation since the introduction of the automobile.  We've been told that it will come with tremendous advantages compared to today's status quo:  lower accident rates, less traffic congestion, and the freedom to use your commute time for things other than steering and using the brake pedal a lot.  And probably the most visible downside is what it will do to the job market for paid drivers.  Every car on the road that used to need a driver but doesn't anymore represents a potential lower- to middle-class job that becomes history. 

The basis on which the editorial favors driverless cars is what historians call the Whig theory of history.  This is the idea that the farther back you go, the worse things were, and that human history is an unbroken series of triumphs over ignorance and primitive ways that will eventually issue in Paradise on earth.  After the horrors of the twentieth century (World War II, to name one), anyone who gives the matter a moment's thought will begin to see holes in the Whig theory.  But it's been around so long that it has become a kind of cliché idea that some writers spout automatically. 

The editorial writers claim that Chicago will become a "cow town" if it doesn't accept driverless cars, and they cite NASA's use of computers to get a man to the moon as an example of how computerized transportation is a good idea.  Well, these are not so much arguments as they are assertions and bad analogies.  The editorial winds up by saying no one banned Model Ts to protect jobs for blacksmiths, and "Old occupations may fade, but new ones come along."  The overall thrust of the article is basically to say, "Deal with it, and don't do something stupid that will make Chicago look like some kind of backward provincial hick town."

Beneath this rather trivial discussion are a number of serious questions.  What role should government play in the deployment of driverless cars?  Should their regulation be at a local, regional, state, or national level, or some combination of the preceding?  What, if anything, should be done to protect the jobs of people whose livelihood is threatened by the advent of driverless cars?  How can we get from the level of automotive safety we have now to a better one by implementing driverless cars, without running into some emergent large-number problem that could cause a significant increase in serious accidents, injuries, and deaths?  Almost none of these questions were addressed by the editorial writers, but if they were operating under a house rule that prohibits editorials of much more than 300 words, well, there's not a lot you can say in 300 words. 

By this point you may have the impression that I favor a ban on driverless cars.  I don't favor a ban, and I don't favor a law against a ban.  What I favor is a serious, in-depth discussion of the questions regarding driverless cars, and at least in the case of this editorial by one of the nation's major newspapers in a city of 2.7 million people, I don't see signs of that. 

There are many signs that the elusive thing called unity is on the decline in this country.  The degree to which citizens trust government to do the right thing has fallen precipitously compared to where it was several decades ago.  And people don't trust a system that they don't understand or feel that they cannot influence when it allows or encourages things that can cause them harm. 

Perhaps the two Chicago aldermen responded to their constituents in the wrong way, but at least they saw a genuine threat to jobs and went about trying to do something about it in response.  Back when the average person could read things that required more than one step of logic to understand, there were typically a few local newspapers to read in any major city, two or three TV and radio networks, and maybe the newsreel at the movie house.  That was it, as far as finding out what was going on in the world, and as a result, those who operated the media took care to use it with a reasonable degree of responsibility, and something like rational debate about great public matters of interest could be carried on.

But now, the media have fractured into a million tweets, Instagrams, and other detritus of electronic communications, most of which are too short to convey anything more than a burst of emotion.  The Chicago paper's editorial is only 300 words long because they probably know from experience that people won't read 1000-word editorials anymore, if they read anything at all.  And talking heads in video clips are pushing out text-based media of all kinds anyway.

I hope we as a nation, and the city of Chicago in particular, both reach a beneficial accommodation to the advent of driverless vehicles that will benefit most people while injuring as few as possible.  But to get there in a way that makes people feel included, the discussion will have to be at a higher level than the Sun-Times has set for us.

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Sources:  The editorial titled "Driverless cars on the road to the future" appeared on the Chicago Sun-Times website on Aug. 25, 2017 at http://chicago.suntimes.com/opinion/editorial-driverless-cars-on-the-road-to-the-future/.

Moving Automated Driving To the Next Level

If there had been a competition for world-class back-seat drivers, my grandmother would have won it hands down.  Back in the 1980s when we were living in Massachusetts, we drove to Boston's Logan Airport and picked her up for a visit.  Despite never having been closer to New England than Ohio in her entire life, she immediately started telling me which turns to take in downtown Boston as soon as I got lost, which I always did anyway, but without her help.  We made it home, but not without lots of needless distraction.

Developers of what the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) calls "automated driving" are facing the opposite problem of back-seat driving in trying to get people in the front seat to pay attention to the road while a robot does what the SAE calls "Level 3" automatic driving. 

In a recent New York Times piece, tech writer John Markoff highlights the problems that arise when autonomous vehicles are not yet capable of 100% "hands-off" operation.  Two or three years ago, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and SAE concurred on a classification scheme for automated driving systems.  What most people do now in older cars when they do all the driving themselves is Level 0 (no automation).  Level 5 is a system that could adapt to any and all driving conditions with no input whatsoever from the driver, who could therefore safely sleep or do crossword puzzles for the whole trip.  No one has yet been able to field a Level 5 system, but the standard assumes we will eventually get there.  In between, there are vehicles such as Tesla cars equipped with an autopilot system (Level 2), and the latest self-driving cars now being fielded by Google's autonomous-car spinoff Waymo (Level 4).  But even Level 4 cars can't cope with all situations, and when a driver starts to treat a Level 2 system like it was Level 5, trouble lies ahead. 

The worst example so far of driver inattention while riding in a partially autonomous vehicle happened in 2016, when a Tesla Model S in Florida failed to detect a semi that suddenly crossed the vehicle's path.  Despite the fact that Tesla warns the driver that he or she must be prepared to take evasive action in such situations, he was apparently watching a video, which was the last thing he saw, let us say.  This fatal accident was the first such mishap in Tesla vehicles, which have since been modified to test the driver's attention periodically.  And if the driver isn't paying consistent attention, the car will terminate the autopilot feature for the rest of the trip, forcing the driver to go back to work.

This is just one specific example of a general problem with partially autonomous vehicles—say Levels 2 through 4.  They all require the driver to be prepared to regain control of the vehicle in an emergency or other situation that the robot driver can't cope with.  But as Markoff points out, going from sheer inattention to fully capable operation of a motor vehicle in a few seconds is not something people do particularly well.

Studies have shown that even with those who are mentally prepared for the transition, it can take as long as five seconds to adjust to the feel of the steering at a particular speed and get to the point where the driver is truly in control and capable of dealing with problems.  Five seconds can be a longer time than you have—a car traveling at 70 MPH will move over 500 feet (156 meters) in five seconds.  If the potential problem is only 200 feet away, by the time you're ready to act it may well be too late.

Those wanting to deploy cars with more and more autonomous features face a chicken-and-egg problem.  Everybody admits that as of today, there is no system in which it is completely safe for the driver to act like he or she is at home in bed.  But to get to that point, we have to gain experience with less-than-perfect systems, which all require the human driver's input at some point.  The issue then becomes how to accustom drivers to this wholly new mode of "driving."  And people being people, they are not always going to follow instructions.  The man who lost his life in the Tesla accident was told to keep his hands on the steering wheel at all times.  But he'd found that nothing bad happened most of the time he didn't, and so would many others unless the system enforces attention in some way, which it now apparently does.

As for me, I may be fairly typical in that I am not interested in automated driving systems until I can trust them at least as well as I can trust my wife to drive—if not better.  We may be encountering a different form of what in aesthetics is known as the "uncanny valley."  Humanoid robots that look like classical robots—hardware sticking out from their metal chests and so on—don't bother us particularly.  And a humanoid robot that is such a good imitation of a human that you can't tell the difference between the robot and a real human presumably wouldn't bother us too much either.  But students of robotics have found that "human-like" robots that are close to real humans, but not close enough, give people the creeps.  And it will give me the creeps, or worse, if I sit behind the wheel without steering unless told to do so by a machine.

If I was sort of driving and sort of not driving a car that was doing things in traffic that I couldn't predict, and I was constantly hoping I wouldn't have to intervene but always wondering if something was about to happen that would require me to grab the wheel—well, I might as well quit my job and start teaching driver's education at Nelson's Driving School for the Chronically Nervous.  Back when high schools were obliged to teach driver's ed, you would learn in a car equipped with two brake pedals, one on the passenger's side where the instructor sat.  My instructor got to use her pedal more than once, and I can now only imagine what torment she went through while she watched me move jerkily through traffic.  If I was riding in anything less than a Level 5 autonomous vehicle, I'd be in the same position as my unfortunate driving instructor—all the time it was moving.

The prospects for autonomous driving hinge critically on how manufacturers and developers will handle the next five or so years, before truly autonomous (Level 5) driving is possible.  It may be the wisest thing to continue mainly with experiments until automakers can say with reasonable confidence and safety what the bus companies have been saying all along:  "Leave the driving to us."

Sources:  John Markoff's article "Robot Cars Can't Count on Us in an Emergency" appeared on the New York Times website on June 7, 2017 at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/07/technology/google-self-driving-cars-handoff-problem.html.  It has a reference to a summary of the SAE Standard J3016 for the classification system of automated driving, at http://templatelab.com/automated-driving/.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on Waymo, the history of autonomous cars, and the uncanny valley.